Messed up teeth can wreak havoc on your health, they just make you constantly sick all the time. It sucks. If I ever get my teeth fixed and it involves removing a bunch of them I probably won’t go this route, but I kinda get it. The dental equivalent of mounting your nemesis’ head on a pike.

I think that’s broadly true, but just because you work somewhere as oppressive as IBM doesn’t mean you don’t long to breathe the free air. I like to imagine some of the contributors to the IBM songbook felt trapped in their day job and grabbed at that as the only available creative outlet, and they had their own magnum opus that they were going to publish just as soon as they felt safe enough to take the leap. I can’t find any credits for the songs so maybe they did.

This is as good an excuse as any to break out the ol’ IBM corporate songbook

Tech has always been suits at the top, hippies at best an annoying necessity because they know how to actually operate the machine.

I think comparison can be accompanied by misery but I don’t think it’s inevitable. I don’t know if it’s possible to go your whole life and not compare yourself to anyone, ever, on any metric. Some people are better than I am at some things, and I learn by comparing myself to them. I think the trick is to not condense it all down into a single spectrum. I mean that for broad moral judgements (e.g. “I am a better person than my boss”) as well as in particular domains (“My co-worker is a worse coder than I am”). I think that type of quick judgement can always be peeled apart and analyzed, and learned from, and I think that resolves a lot of the tension that typically comes from comparison.

four pane terminal: top left running htop, top right showing the commit history for a gnarly repo, bottom right just running cat /dev/urandom, bottom left is a cowsay script reciting the dialogue of “Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace”

This is my real answer lol. All I ever run on my chomebook is this and a web browser.

For me it’s always https://hackertyper.com/

Indeed. Sure it’s worth it or whatever but it’s the fucking worst.

Not OP but I was in a similar situation. Whole family was poor, white, Christian, Republican, listened to Rush Limbaugh (and the horde of soundalikes) on the radio in the car every morning on the way to school and everywhere else we went. I don’t think I ever really bought in but when you’re a kid there’s just so much about the world you have to take on faith, often because you don’t know there are other options besides the defaults you grew up with. Eventually you get around to questioning things and the foundations start to crumble. For me the first domino was that I couldn’t really square why god would make people gay if being gay was a sin, and they didn’t really seem to be doing any harm, even the very abstract “sanctity of marriage” argument kinda falls off once you see that het people get unlimited “violating the sanctity of marriage” passes and queer folks get automatic damnation. After that more foundational assumptions started to fall away and I drifted further from the church over time until I became the heathen radical socialist that shames the memory of my god-fearing parents to this very day.

Broseidon, Lord of the Brocean.

Sometimes I am sad but I don’t really feel sad, or feel sad enough… Music helps me feel the feelings I already have, but have a hard time feeling. Some of those feelings are sad and the sad ones are just as important to feel. I guess what I’m describing is catharsis.

The Post Office is secretly being controlled by the US Government. If you look at the actual laws of the US it allows the President to appoint someone called the Postmaster General who’s in charge of the whole thing.

I think it would be a pretty good prank to bring this up in a “favorite crazy conspiracy theory” conversation where all but one participant agrees that it’s a baseless conspiracy theory and see if the one other person insists that the Postmaster General Theory is real, or goes along with the crowd. But I really don’t think my friends are coordinated enough to pull it off.

Especially the turrets. I love them so much. The first time I took one down and got hit with the “I don’t hate you” 💔 😭

Kinda. I definitely had hamburger helper back in the 80s, but kit meals were a luxury we could only sometimes afford. Necessity is often the mother of culinary invention but even among “the poor” there’s some variability in cash and time (and information availability) constraints, and things like hamburger helper (cheap but not the cheapest, but also quick and easy to make) have been a fixture alongside the true broke-ass “we need food and have basically zero money” recipes.

Wow, I had forgotten how much I used to detest lima beans. Don’t think I’ve had them since I was a kid. I wonder if I’ll like them now.

A quick search says cheddar and blue cheeses for this type.

Usually not. I have not had the pleasure of this particular variety but in my experience it’s just plain old pasta and cheese and herbs.

Grew up poor, didn’t know it. Lots of Mac 'n Cheese w/ hotdogs and canned vegetables. I remember the first time I had a fresh green bean, I was put off by the texture. Wasn’t used to vegetables with structure.

Edit: also a fair amount of Hamburger Helper in my childhood. It’s OK.

Pasta and seasoning. And cheese I guess. Intended to me mixed with ground beef in order to stretch it into more meals. It’s not awful, just poor people food.